How easy it could be to be cynical about all this attention. In that New York Times article, Howard Jacobson provides a stern reminder that “she isn’t Jane, your best friend. She is Jane Austen, a novelist of unfamiliar and uncomfortable genius.”

But I don’t have a problem with all the noise around the 200th anniversary of Austen’s death. There’s cause for celebration in this small outbreak of affectionate Austen-mania, and how impressive it is that so many people feel such a tight connection with this figure from the past.

Persuasion: Jane Austen's kung fu novel?

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Why do we still feel this close to Austen? I’ve heard plenty of theories about how - like Shakespeare - she’s a writer open to interpretation and the interpolation of your own themes and concerns. US rightwingers see her as an admirable social and fiscal conservative; lefties in the UK see her as a feminist. Some read lessons about slavery into her books. Some see her questioning social hierarchies.

I suspect the real reason she’s endured is more simple. As reading Persuasion this month has reminded us: Jane Austen is damn good (no news there, I know) and her final finished novel remains a model for writers of the future.

Austen has serious practical lessons to impart. Unlike most of our contemporaries, for instance, she understands how to use tense. She can write vivid immediate action without resorting to the historic present. She is also a fantastic minimalist when it comes to description; she conveys so much of the “sweet scenes of autumn” in just a few words. The most extended passage on the season is deliciously ironic:

Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves, and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness, that season which had drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling …

Despite her own reticence about those lines of feeling, she does just what’s needed to establish a crisp gentle glow and sense of the waning year.

Landscapes get even shorter shrift. “The brow of the hill, where they remained, was a cheerful spot,” she writes at one point. And that’s enough: any more would get in the way of the action (a writing tip also endorsed by Elmore Leonard).

Austen devotes her space to conversation. Like PG Wodehouse after her, Austen gets to dialogue as quickly as possible – and makes it sharp and lively. She frequently employs free indirect speech, a method of third-person narration that feels like it is coming from inside a character. It is presented in a similar style to the neutral, godlike narrative voice, but it is partial and personal – and all the more intriguing for it.

Some people even say that Jane Austen, along with Goethe in German, invented this technique. (I’d argue that it’s much older. Even Virgil dips in and out of Aeneas’s head. Look at when he’s thinking of the kindest way to deceive Dido in Aeneid IV. ) But Austen uses it better than almost anyone.

She is especially good at making us feel as if we’re in a character’s mind, while maintaining just enough authorial participation to make us question everything:

Everything now marked out Louisa for Captain Wentworth; nothing could be plainer; and where many divisions were necessary, or even where they were not, they walked side by side nearly as much as the other two.

The truth is that there is plenty that could be plainer; Anne is wrong. Or at least, that’s how it feels when you read it. But Austen brilliantly leaves a snag of doubt in there, too. Perhaps this is the narrative voice and they are together? No. It must be Anne. As a reader, you have such debates subconsciously, and it both drives you deeper into Anne’s mind and leaves a shiver of ambiguity.

Next time I get a group of creative writing students in front of me, I’m going to insist that they read Persuasion.